Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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It is well thought out. The "AI Magna Carta" is a stretch, though.

Some good insights:

60. Anthropomorphizing AI also poses specific challenges for the development of children, potentially encouraging them to develop patterns of interaction that treat human relationships in a transactional manner, as one would relate to a chatbot. Such habits could lead young people to see teachers as mere dispensers of information rather than as mentors who guide and nurture their intellectual and moral growth. Genuine relationships, rooted in empathy and a steadfast commitment to the good of the other, are essential and irreplaceable in fostering the full development of the human person.

That's a good one. Teacher time is a scarce resource, but the chatbot is always there, and undemanding if not asked anything.

Kids who grow up talking mostly to AIs may have that kind of relationship with the world. Historically, kids who grew up with servants around sometimes defaulted to that kind of transactional relationship. Now that can scale up. Amusingly, asking Google's AI about "bringing up children with servants" produced an excellent summary of the topic.

Years ago, the French Catholic author Georges Bernanos warned that “the danger is not in the multiplication of machines, but in the ever-increasing number of men accustomed from their childhood to desire only what machines can give.”

That's an argument against too much screen time for kids.

I would put a slight twist on it though: it seems to me like kids begin by default with very transactional patterns, and must be taught to have "relationships rooted in empathy and a steadfast commitment to the good of the other". The very patience that, say, teachers or nursery staff have to have give that impression: the ideal staff is always patient, never tired or irritable, never bored with what the children do or say, and so on; and it's partly the parents' job to help point out to children that the professional people they interact with are real people who have their own lives.

The challenge with LLMs is that there is no "real person" behind there to have an own life. The AI doesn't go home at the end of the day, never needs rest, never needs to have "me time" or let their guard down, has no other independent purpose than to serve the child (or some other human). So if we were to replace all the service workers in our lives with AIs, we'd lose loads of opportunities for developing empathy.

Children need human attention to thrive.

Classes are WAY too big.

There have been several very successful projects focused on getting adults to do homework with children.

Way too big for whom? While it is a common trope that we see classrooms with 25+ children/teenagers as too big, I have rarely seen a comment that complains on university lectures hosting too many students. How come? Good Lecture-design is a direct function of the percentage of students in a classroom who understand the input without lots of clarification needed. There's a reason why we have different forms of teaching & learning in universities. Big passive lecture halls make sense to transfer basic information to a lot of people. Small study groups make sense to deepen knowledge on a topic, midsized seminars are useful to stimulate students in questioning their own understanding of a topic and getting rid of blind spots in their conceptions. Classrooms are similarly sized (at least in my country) compared to university seminars. It is not the number of pupils that is too high. It is the architecture and structure of teaching and learning in schools that doesnt account for different learning/teaching formats and even more so ill-equipped teachers. Studies have found again and again that classroom-size, even though often discussed, are actually a minor factor in the quality of teaching and learning. The number one factor by large is the teacher. If you have a capable teacher, who can lit the interest of their students, performance goes up. If you have an unmotivated, badly/barely trained teacher (not necessarily trained as a teacher, but as a storyteller and facilitator), you can shrink the classroom as much as you want, the students won't learn anything.

The same goes for assisted homework-sessions. If the adult can ignite the interest of the student and get past the "I have to do this, but I don't even know why", it will work. Otherwise...well, ChatGTP provides at least a baseline of quality in explaining and rephrasing learning material.

So yes, I totally agree, children need human attention for a good development, but not necessarily in their study-time. If you look at the "hole in the wall"-experiments by S. Mitra, you'll see that the attention of a granny who asks with earnest interest what a child has learned today, the kid massively profits from that interaction even though the granny has no clue what the kid is talking about.

Children still learn ways how to process input at young ages, smaller classes are likely beneficial for everyone as more attention is awarded to them. University students do not need such attention, students do miss lectures and catch up on them independently if they need to.

It could be argued that the emergence of the web and search engines in particular has established this as a common pattern long before AI was around. I'm not convinced that AI represents a dramatic change to this behavior, though the point about anthropomorphizing AI likely acts as a magnifier.

I'm sure we could extend this farther into the separation of people out of villages into cities and the rise of transactional capitalism.

I think the main difference is the degree of anthropomorphizing that happens with new chatbots. I mean, most kids in the 2000's didn't believe that they were literally asking Jeeves a question, but a lot of users today actually think of AI as an anthropomorphic being.

> but a lot of users today actually think of AI as an anthropomorphic being.

You think more than 10% of users?

It's easily closer to 90% than 10%.

> Such habits could lead young people to see teachers as mere dispensers of information rather than as mentors who guide and nurture their intellectual and moral growth.

In the US,

"guide and nurture their intellectual and moral growth"

is not always regarded as the best or even a desirable part of teaching.

> Genuine relationships, rooted in empathy and a steadfast commitment to the good of the other, are essential and irreplaceable in fostering the full development of the human person.

This reminds me of one of the main themes of Neal Stephenson's 1995 novel "Diamond Age": being "raised" by an AI agent, with vs without a caring human in the loop.

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